new and additional encouragements to a moral course of life, we should not forget, through a spirit of one-sidedness, to strike the balance between their useful and hurtful tendencies. After so much has been said of the pernicious results arising from restricted freedom of thought, it hardly seems necessary to enforce this caution by any circumstantial exposition, and I have, besides, already dwelt sufficiently, in the former part of this chapter, on the hurtfulness of all positive promotion of religiousness by the State. If those injurious consequences of restriction were confined merely to the results of the inquiries—if they occasioned nothing more than incompleteness or inexactness in our scientific knowledge, we might proceed, with some show of reason, to estimate the advantages which might perhaps be justly expected to flow from such a policy. But, as it is, the danger is far more serious. The importance of free inquiry extends to our whole manner of thinking, and even acting. He who is accustomed to judge of truth and error without regard to external relations, either as affecting himself or others, and to hear them so discussed, is able to realize principles of action more calmly and consistently, and with more exclusive reference to loftier points of view, than one whose reflections are constantly influenced by a variety of circumstances not essential to the subject under investigation. Inquiry, as well as conviction, the result to which it leads, is spontaneity; while belief is reliance on some foreign power, some external perfection, moral or intellectual. Hence it is that firmness and self-dependence are such striking characteristics of the thoughtful inquirer, while a corresponding weakness and inaction seem to mark the confiding believer. It is true, that where belief has stifled every form of doubt and gained the supreme mastery, it often creates a far more irresistible courage and extraordinary spirit of defiant endurance, as we see in the history of
